I never remember nice dreams; only the bad ones stick.
For since most of our living is unconscious, play is like matchstrokes in the void, bringing into light the structures we behave by, illuminating for us, however briefly, our deep meanings.
The imagination equips us to perceive reality when it is not fully materialized.
And with listening, too, it seems to me, it is not the ear that hears, it is not the physical organ that performs the act of inner receptivity. It is the total person who hears. Sometimes the skin seems to be the best listener, as it prickles and thrills, say to a sound or a silence; or the fantasy, the imagination: how it bursts into inner pictures as it listens and then responds by pressing its language, its forms, into the listening clay. To be open to what we hear, to be open in what we say. .
From the seed grows a root, then a sprout; from the sprout, the seedling leaves; from the leaves, the stem; around the stem, the branches; at the top, the flower. . . We cannot say that the seed causes the growth, nor that the soil does. We can say that the potentialities for growth lie within the seed, in mysterious life forces, which, when properly fostered, take on certain forms.
We have to believe that a creative being lives within ourselves, whether we like it or not, and that we must get out of its way, for it will not give us peace until we do.
All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.
Spiritually good people, pure in heart, who long for the Blessed Sacrament but cannot receive at the time, can receive spiritually. . . even a hundred times a day, in sickness and in health, with immeasurable grace and profit.
The slave will be free. Democracy in America will yet be a glorious reality; and when the top-stone of that temple of freedom which our fathers left unfinished shall be brought forth with shoutings and cries of grace unto it, when our now drooping Liberty lifts up her head and prospers, happy will he be who can say, with John Milton, "Among those who have something more than wished her welfare, I, too, have my charter and freehold of rejoicing to me and my heirs. "
I believe that the horrifying deterioration in the ethical conduct of people today stems from the mechanization and dehumanization of our lives. A disastrous by-product of the development of the scientific and technical mentality. We are guilty. Man grows cold faster than the planet he inhabits.
You can spend your whole life trying to be popular, but at the end of the day, the size of the crowd at your funeral will be largely dictated by the weather.